Of The King of the Quiz Show!

I was out for dinner last night with an old friend of mine and Legal-Island, Paul. Paul is always great company and a true gentlemen but I discovered something about him last night I never knew. On the way back from the restaurant we decided we should patronise the local hostelry for to check the quality of its pints of the black stuff.
We happened upon a "Quiz Night" that was in full swing and took to the corner of the pub so as not to interrupt those who were taking it very seriously - and there were a good few of them.
The rest of the evening went something like this :
Quiz Master : "Who invented the mini skirt"
Paul "Oh that will be Mary Quant"
Quiz Master "Which Beetle married last"!
Paul "On that'll be Paul McCartney"
Quiz Master "Who was the lead singer of the Specials"
Paul "Ah sure that'll be Terry Hall"
Quiz Master "Where's the La Scalla Opera House"
Paul "Oh that'll be Milan"

And so the night continued. Eventually we left with us both feeling much the wiser but for very different reasons..

Of The Four Hour Body Part II

I've been practising my total immersion style swimming this week as advised by Ferris in "The Four Hour Body". It's going slowly but well. This week I've been concentrating on my breathing. He advises that you breathe out in the water before taking a slug full of air as you rotate your head around. This I'm doing and breathing out through my nose which for some reason I find much easier. It is also a practise that creates far fewer bubbles than exhaling through your mouth allowing you to see where you're going which is no bad thing either.

At the end of my 40 lengths I stopped and asked the guy in the lane next to me (a fine swimmer and triathlete) whether he had ever heard of "total immersion swimming".He said he had and that his friend swears by it. As we talked I noticed an odd shape behind his right ear under his swimming cap. Upon inquiry he promptly produced what he said was a "wetometer" which can be set to click at a rate you want your arms to enter the water. He said you can also get a gadget to count the laps for you as you do them which works by adding one lap each time it detects you've changed direction.

It's a complicated process swimming nowadays. It's changed a bit since the day I first got in a pool with goggles that flooded with water the moment you put them underwater.

Of Another Four Hours

I'm currently reading The Four Hour Body by Tim Ferris. I have to admit to being quite a follower of Ferris for I got huge amounts from his book The Four Hour Work Week when I read it last year.
The bye-line to the book on the front cover explains that it is "An uncommon guide to rapid fat-loss incredible sex and becoming superhuman" so fairly bold in its ambitions.
Aside from the naughty bits in the book (and there are a good few of those) there are also chapters on getting the perfect night's sleep, reversing injuries and swimming effortlessly in just 10 days. This last chapter interests me greatly. He claims to have progressed from being a hopeless swimmer who struggled to do two lengths at a time to someone who was swimming 40 lengths of a pool and then 2 miles in open water within just two months. He does his best to describe the method of swimming he recommends but four still photos of a guy in the water accompanied by some narrative doesn't help very much. Here's hoping Googling his sources will lead me to a video clip online which will make me a super fast swimmer and the envy of the early morning pool boys. Why do I doubt it all somehow?

Of A Revolution Going On...

It's September - the beginning of the "Silly Season" at work. This is when we all put our heads down for 3 months and go for it and do one big event after another. The first big event up is "The Resolution Revolution" on 26th September which is already close to selling out with almost 100 people booked to attend. This event is one of our most important ever. It's about trying to persuade both parties at work to think about mediation first in conflict scenarios rather than grievance procedures. It's an important message and if we get it right we can do huge amounts to improve work place relations in Northern Ireland (and who knows other jurisdictions after that).

Of Predicting the Future

There's a piece of software for just about anything you do nowadays. That's how it seems to me right now anyway. I know this because Legal-Island is having a software makeover at the moment. We've introduced bookings software, event creation software and presently we're test driving performance management software.We've tried and discarded stress management software and we will be investigating 360 appraisal software next.
About 10 years ago I remember reading an article by a Futurist expert who was predicting that all this new software along with other technical developments would make us so efficient that most workers would be home by lunchtime every day having run out of things to do. Emmm here's hoping but not expecting I suppose.

Of Season 2 "The Silly Season"

We're all furiously busy at the moment preparing for Season 2 which begins in earnest next week. Season 2 is known in the company as "Silly Season" for it is the three months of the year in which we do the majority of our work. We have 7 Annual Review Conferences to do throughout the UK and Ireland and an awful lot in between. The "awful lot in between" bit includes The Resolution Revolution which has also gone huge attracting to date upwards of 100 people. I'm billed in the marketing literature for this event as saying "It's the most important event we've ever done" and I genuinely believe it is. It's our attempt to persuade a large no of employers that the way they handle workplace conflict at work at the moment is wrong. Not only wrong but inefficient, costly and counter productive. It's a brave message but hey what are you about if you have nothing to say?

Of Years Gone By

A strange thing happened to me today and it went like this. Early this morning I went to the local car boot sale to look for a couple of friends more than to buy anything in particular. But there about three rows in was a rather nice coffee table which, I thought, suited my lounge. A little later and it's on its way to my car. The seller, a guy about my age looked very vaguely familiar. As he helped me to the car with it he kept on looking at me as I did him. Finally, I took the plunge and stated that I thought I'd seen him somewhere before. It turned out I had, 30 years ago at school in Northampton!
We talked about that strange old school and how we both managed to survive it neither of us having particularly good memories of it or indeed the school bully, who happened to be in our class. He got 15 years for manslaughter when he left school I was informed. Funny world innit?